Universal rights rhetoric is undercut by the citizen-state’s arbitrary jurisdiction

Evidence

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights begins by asserting “the inherent dignity” and “the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family,” and then turns immediately to the state. In doing so it implicitly accepts the fact that the universal character of the rights-bearing person is made the responsibility of sovereign states, each of which has exclusive jurisdiction over a limited group within the human family. … Thus when Kant wrote of “the Idea of the dignity of a rational being who obeys no law other than that which he at the same time enacts himself” he referred not to the subject of the state (who is substitutable in war and always obliged to obey his country’s laws) but to the rational, morally sovereign human being for whom there is no equivalent. — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 664

Categorization

• QUESTION: The ‘substitutable in war’ citizen vs. the morally sovereign human being — does this distinction predict which bodies the state may dispose of versus which it must honor?